How to Read

Our guest Heather Love is out to convince us of the value of description —Click here for more about the episode...Why description matters (with Heather Love)

Our guest Heather Love is out to convince us of the value of description -- yep, plain old description. In our conversation today, she argues that description has gotten a bad reputation in literary studies.

Lately, Heather has been reading sociology books from the 1950s and 60s. She thinks that their neutral, distanced descriptions have an ethical value that most literary scholars haven’t recognized.

We live in a world with a long history of atrocity — from the colonizationClick here for more about the episode...Atrocity, time, and the novel (with Bruce Robbins)

We live in a world with a long history of atrocity -- from the colonization of the Americas to the Japanese massacre at Nanking. Our guest Bruce Robbins is curious about how these past atrocities show up in novels. In our conversation today, he focuses on how the novel plays with time. By paying attention to these shifting timelines, Bruce suggests readers can begin to imagine a more just future.

Sometimes it pays to zoom in. Today, we focus on some opening sentences which reward closeClick here for more about the episode...Intriguing opening sentences (with Jenny Davidson)

Sometimes it pays to zoom in. Today, we focus on some opening sentences which reward close attention. Our guest is Jenny Davidson -- an English professor who’s also a novelist herself. She shows us how these carefully-crafted opening sentences can orient, intrigue or even mislead us.